Sunday, April 12, 2009

It's another one of those situations where I'm not an electrical engineer (dammit I'm never an electrical engineer!) so I really can't appreciate this comic I don't think. I mean, I see what he's going for, obviously, apparently Ben Franklin set some convention that was HOLY CRAP WRONG and so the Time Machine Man decided to go tell him to change it rather than stop something terrible from happening! good one, time machine man!

But yeah, having never had to work with this sort of thing, I can't fully grasp if this comic is exactly as petty and annoying as it seems, or if it actually has some merit. It seems like it's just saying "ha ha, I'm not an electrical engineer but I totally know about the problems you sometimes face!" but hey! maybe I'm wrong. Anyone get any value out of this?

Franklin got the poles mixed up. The one he said was negative actually had a positive charge (missing electrons) and the one he said was positive actually had a negative charge (extra electors). An honest mistake, no way he could have known without somewhat modern equipment.

(I'm not an electrical engineer btw. Maybe you just didn't pay enough attention in High School. :D )

It's not even that the poles are _wrong_, it's just that, to most of us, it would make more sense for the excess of electrons to have a + sign, and the deficiency of electrons to have a - sign. It's something everyone in high school science runs into, and it's vaguely annoying. I suppose it's an "electrical engineer" since they have to deal with this stuff often enough that it would be the first thing that came to mind.

I feel that this one would benefit massively from having the caption left out.

The comic proper isn't bad to me; anyone who has at least taken a couple of physics classes has probably wished he could go back in time and tell Ben Franklin he's doing it wrong. It's obvious humor, yes, but I'll admit I laughed.

But the caption? It adds nothing, and irritates the hell out of me. "The robot apocalypse" feels like an unfunny bit of stock Randall humor, and, moreover, reminds me very uncomfortably of the fucking miserable Matrix comic that came right before this one. And unless I'm missing something, how do the electrical engineer's actions preclude stopping the robot apocalypse? Can't they just use it for that afterward? It makes no sense to me, and screws up what was otherwise a passable joke.

The caption reminds of Utahraptor in the last panel of Thursday's qwantz. It makes a joke less funny if you make it and then keep going. I GOT IT, THANKS

Actually, on further consideration: the caption would be an excellent addition if it were placed before the comic, because then it would set up the joke instead of serving as a pointless and unfunny continuation of the joke. I remember Carl making a similar comment about another strip, but I don't remember which.

I am an electrical engineer, and trust me when I say that it doesn't make the strip any funnier. If anything, it makes things worse, because it implies everyone from your profession is a nitpicking tool bag. It's insulting and irritating. The conventions of current direction aren't annoying at all, really. We don't even notice them after the first day, because we're too busy using what we learn to be useful and solve problems that are actually, you know, problems. Only in xkcdland are there thoroughly useless electrical engineers with nothing better to do than gripe about the commonly accepted current model. A better joke would have had the engineer going back in time to prevent xkcd from ever being created by snapping Randall's pencil every time he tried to draw something that sucks. There'd be no real punchline, which means Randall might actually pull it off for once. It would just be one of those jokes where the absurd length and amount of repetition involved become the joke.

Anonymous #2: I'm sorry to hear that there's someone behind you with a gun to your head, forcing to click on every link you come across and read the page that it links to, even if it's a comic you don't particularly care for. What a bummer, huh? I'm sure glad I have the freedom to ignore links in blog comments and not bitch about them, apparently unlike you.

Gumby also got it completely backwards. It's that Franklin didn't know which side was gaining something and which was losing, so he just arbitrarily selected, and as a result, electrons are considered to have a negative charge.

When I was a curious little kid who was learning about basic electronics I would have thought this comic was uproariously funny (I think I even thought it'd be nice if we had time machines so we could go back and tell Franklin about his mistake). Maybe this comic is intended for 7-year-olds?

Not-all-right: this is Randy's thing. He assumes that scientists/engineers are all really super devoted to their fields, but he only really knows the meta of most fields, so he assumes they are all really concerned with the meta. Which nobody is.

I think this was intended not as a funny comic but as a "get out of my head!" comic, also intended to provoke some forum discussion on what other weird historical artifacts make math slightly inconvenient in some common cases -- eg. base 60 units of time and rotation measurement, the definition of pi, the way most people count on fingers compared to a bunch of different clever ways to count past 5 on one hand (I myself am nerdy enough to use a sign language up to ten), certain Latin and Greek letters being used for more than one concept, metric vs. imperial, the way two different almost identical greek squiggles are used in quantum theory, the particular trigonometric functions we tend to use compared to some others that would be just as useful but make some equations easier, etc.. I think the forums have covered most of these by now.

Because everybody learning this stuff, in high school (and later in post-secondary when some more magnetic equations and such have negative signs), thinks exactly this. Or at least, I sure did. Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if I've read basically this comic before, maybe not in comic form.

Any engineering student is going to at least have to take physics, and will be at first a little confused that we pretend the positive charges are moving around in the theory that we use. I have myself thought of this kind of thing countless times, and wondered why we could not have declared electrons as positives and protons as negative, or do a general fixit for the mess Franklin left us. As such, I think this is my favorite comic in a very long time. I am sorry that you do not get it. And yes, the alt text sucks but I laughed hard enough without it.

Collins: I agree that the caption would have been much better before the comic rather then after it, but I don't think the strip would have functioned as well without it. If you count the alt text as part of the strip then sure you could do away with the caption, but I prefer to think of the alt text as a sidebar rather then part of the comic which made me feel that was the weakest link in this one.

Ch00f: Ah the glories of binary, I also like a lot of the stuff from ThinkGeek.

Notions of positive and negative charge are of course purely arbitrary. They could just as well be labelled Ying and Yang, or Male and Female, or Fred and Bill. But they happen to be labelled Positive and Negative, and are so labelled that when a molecule loses electrons, it gains charge, which is ridiculous. Life would certainly be easier for trainee chemists if electricity was labelled the other way around.

I don't know why someone who doesn't know this is commenting on xkcd at all. This is basic stuff. This is Junior Cert. Science.

In high school physics, I learned that protons has a positive charge, and electrons have a negative charge. That's it. The fact that Ben Franklin just arbitrarily selected which was which is more a history lesson than an important scientific fact. Considering that I made it through Physics 1 in college without becoming aware of this fact proves to me that it's not something that everyone who has taken a Physics class should know (and before then inevitable "you probably went to a shitty college" counter-argument pops up, I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech, so fuck you in advance).

It seems to me that the point of this comic is not to generate laughs, but to let people who know the history behind a specific scientific convention feel smug about knowing it, even though it's just a bit of trivia and has absolutely nothing to do with how intelligent they actually are. If you can tell me how knowing Ben's "mix-up" will help you with advance problem-solving skills, then I might change my mind, but you can't, because it doesn't.

I actually found this fairly funny, and I think the caption is important. Setup of the comic: "Sign conventions in electricity are annoying, what if we could go back in time to fix it?" (not that funny). Punchline: "Sign conventions in electricity are annoying *and generate errors that can cost lives*; if only we could go back in time and fix them!"There is a lot of truth in this: several space missions actually failed for similar reasons, such as a metric/imperial mixup. As for signs, they really make for frequent mistakes. My father, who is a theoretical physicist, often comes home saying "Today, I have spent all day tracking a sign that is wrong in my calculations" (sometimes it is "a factor 2").

Why are they worried about what they should do with their time machine? They have a FUCKING TIME MACHINE. They can go anywhen. People try to destroy it? Go back in time and lend your mates a hand. You could do it ad infinitum. RARGH.

poore managed to make it through Physics 1 in college without becoming aware of the fact that sign conventions don't actually mean anything. They're just conventions. Labels. There is nothing intrinsically negative about electrons.

There's actually nothing wrong with the sign convention; it's just backwards. It leads us to marking current in the opposite direction of what the electrons are actually moving in, for example. But ultimately, there's no actual problem, aside from the fact that it is confusing when you try to picture what's actually going on with the electrons.

Like everyone else, I found the signage convention confusing/annoying at first. Like everyone else, after using it for a bit, I GOT USED TO IT. I mean, shit, I'm just a CS/Math major and I managed to get through 2 years of HS physics, 2 semesters of college physics, and 1 semester of EE without ever crapping my pants.

can i just point out that i admitted this was a rare comic that I didn't get? people are giving me a hard time about this, like "hurr hurr Carl thinks he's so smart and gets all the xkcds" but a) i wrote that that wasn't true and b) clearly I did get it, as explained, i just didn't have the experience needed to find it funny. Luckily, there are a great many comments here that reassure me that it would not have been funny anyway.

And since when does electrical engineering fall into the "xkcd niche" of math, romance, sarcasm, and language?

What's with all this, "I learned this in high school, why didn't you?" The assumption that everyone was taught everything you were, and anyone who does not share your knowledge must be less intelligent just doesn't work.

I, for one, took Physics in high school, but only learned about mechanics. None of this electromagnetism business.

@Subculture: The assumption that everyone was taught everything you were *does* work if you assume that education is based on standardised syllabuses and that exam boards are roughly equivalent and will test for the same areas of knowledge, which holds true in Britain, at least.

Well... I laughed. I think I have the wrong idea of this place.Mind you, the design on that sign is truly, truly awful. Seriously?

"THEUNCOMFORTABLETRUTHS WELL"

?

Centre it, make that "THE" lowercase and smaller, don't just sodding leave it hanging up there with a space the size of Seattle to the right of it. And "UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS" is one idea; you can enjamb it if you have to, but you really shouldn't attach "WELL" to "TRUTHS". It makes it seem as if you have a truths well that is uncomfortable.

(yeah, i don't care much about humour, but graphic design is something i get uptight about, apparently. didn't stop me only getting a c in it, though.)

Speaking as an EE in training, I think there are much more egregious faults in scientific nomenclature that randall could have attacked.

For example, electrical engineers use j to denote imaginary numbers because i was already arbitrarily chosen for current.

Also, the earth's "north" pole is actually the south pole of its magnetic core. We call it north because the north ends of our magnets point that way.

In the spherical coordinate system, Math and Physics people use theta and phi for exact opposite purposes.

So there are many better things that Randall could have attacked, but I guess it's harder to pinpoint these with a single time jump.

Though, one could make the argument that he would be making everything worse, because if Ben switched the convention, the right hand rule would become the left hand rule, and everyone knows righties are better.

Oh yeah, also I'd like to add that a lot of electricity and magnetism is taught in SI units which require these two arbitrary universal constants: The permittivity of free space and the permeability of free space. You can avoid both of these if you use CGS units which base all calculations off the speed of light.

The people defining the math originally didn't realize that light was electromagnetic radiation.

Hibbert: Homer, I'm afraid you'll have to undergo a coronary bypass operation.Homer: Say it in English, Doc.Hibbert: You're going to need open heart surgery.Homer: Spare me your medical mumbo-jumbo.Hibbert: We're going to cut you open and tinker with your ticker.Homer: Could you dumb it down a shade?

Really, xkcd could just quote old Simpsons episodes and I'd still find it way better than I do.

Oh, shut up. You're responding as well. Don't you see! When a man stares into the abyss, he should take care that the abyss does not stare also into him. And he who fights monsters should watch that he to does not become a monster! And stuff.

(I've tried to learn it from books of philosophy, and yet it only clicked when I heard it on a Radio 4 topical comedy show. I am ashamed.)

"I mean, I see what he's going for, obviously, apparently Ben Franklin set some convention that was HOLY CRAP WRONG and so the Time Machine Man decided to go tell him to change it rather than stop something terrible from happening! good one, time machine man!"

That's all there is to it. That's the joke.

Knowing exactly what convention Franklin set is not important at all and adds nothing to the "joke".

Also, admitting you don't get something makes you look less intelligent.okay so how does anyone learn anything?

You are a jackass. You are the reason people feel badly about themselves, you big bully. And the only reason you say this is because you /think/ you get things right when you first hear them but first, not everyone learns the same way, and second, you probably don't and people are like wow what a pompous ass who pretends to know wtf is going on.

Are you the dumbest person who has ever visited this website, or the dumbest person alive? Have you looked at the URL lately?

It is xkcdSUCKS.blogspot.com.

How about the title bar? "XKCD SUCKS."

What were you expecting? Laughs and frolics where we all worship Randy? What the fuck is your problem? If you don't want us to "ruin" the joke by complaining about it--like, if you are concerned that reading people complain about it will make it unfunny--FIND ANOTHER FUCKING WEBSITE. That is ALL WE ARE DOING HERE, is COMPLAINING ABOUT XKCD.

I mean, seriously? What part of "xkcd sucks" do you not GET? It is a pretty straightforward fucking title! The premise of this blog is incredibly fucking simple! WHY ARE YOU SO MUCH OF A COMPLETE AND UTTER FUCKWIT?

There is literally no excuse for saying something so mind-numbingly idiotic. I mean, chatbots on the internet are more intelligent--AT LEAST THEY ARE CAPABLE OF LEARNING. Jesus Christ. I am not even exaggerating when I say you are the dumbest person I have EVER FUCKING ENCOUNTERED. And I've been to some festering havens of stupidity before--you tower above them all, a titan of imbecility. Why your peers have not put you out of your misery years ago, I can't begin to fathom. Your continued existence is a severe discredit to the human race, and a striking proof that if there is a God, he is either evil or incompetent.

And I'm a molecular biologist who had 3 years of physics in high school, 3 semesters of it in college and did an electronics project back in high school. This is not funny. Maybe it's just that I never got the problem with the notation and thought people who bitch about it are mentally challenged somehow. It's just not complicated: Electron gain means you add a minus charge, means the effective amount of plus charges goes down by one. Anyone complaining about it is as bizarre as a mathematician being baffled by the idea of zero.

I never had to muck about much with Maxwell's equations since that was only in my last physics course, and I can see how you might be a bit annoyed having to keep track of the minus signs all the time... But then there's the right hand rule which saves your ass every time, all the time.

Electrons moving the wrong way? The field lines show the force a test charge would feel. That test charge is 1. As in, plus one. Electrons have the backwards charge, they go backwards.

I just don't see what the big deal is, guys. Do you have to work at CERN to appreciate how annoying that tiny quirk of the notation is? I'd have figured anyone smart enough to be at CERN wouldn't be logic bombed by the concept of more than one notation being possible and equally correct.

"earlier brought up" is not in any way a split infinitive. "brought" is a past tense of "bring"; infinitives are never in the past tense. PHEW. Just thought I'd actually post that because everyone else who knew safely ignored it. Unlike them, I am drunk.

Ar-Pharazon, the problem with the notation is that by convention it's the opposite of reality.

Reality says that you add electrons. Notation says you must subtract charge. Electrons don't go "backwards": Electrons are part of reality and so they go properly. It's the notation that by convention is backwards.

Yes, not everyone gets annoyed by convention being opposed to reality. But some of us would prefer human convention not to be so opposed. Some of us would prefer notation to match reality, not tooppose it.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

Frequently Asked Questions

Divided into two convenient categories, based on whether you think this website

Rob's Rants

When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.